since the start of animating I have developed the style in which I draw backgrounds immensely, the influence the research I did at the start helped form depth in my work and pushed me to experiment with the style of the backgrounds while staying within time constraints. the difference in detail in the first and most recent background is similar but the quality is drastically different after gaining experience of how to give depth without overworking an image.

One of the factors that I had to keep mind of when designing the backgrounds was the change from bright yellows to dark greens this transition is pretty abrupt, but after completing scene 4 shot 2 (which is a shot showing the landscape changing as the character move through it) this will become much cleaner and clearer.

Decorating the bark of the trees I thoughts back to the stone carving I saw at Exeter museum and used it to designs a geometric pattern instead of making the bark look natural or plain like the rest of the trees, I chose to do this so to make the backgrounds interesting without making them more detailed or overpowering with the character animation which is more important to look at, however the backgrounds play an extremely important role in showing how the characters feel and accentuating the feeling of being lost and alone, having the detail of the tree truck draws attention to the scenery around them instead of just showing their movements without context.

To make sure I was making the backgrounds of the forest authentic, I visited the woods to study and photograph the landscape, I was drawn to how the red bark compliments the green background of the leaves, this was very cinematic and I later used this when designing one of my backgrounds and kept it in mind throughout animating the 5th scene.

Living close to the woodlands has been a great benefit to this project and I have been able to study wildlife up close throughout the stage of this project which was given me great help in designing how the are should look and how it makes people feel or at least how being in the woods makes me feel, when I’m deep in the forest I often have a sense of being lost which I don’t find when in towns or city’s through this project I have attempted tovisualize and shear my experice of being in a forest aswell as explored somthing totally unknown to me which is american deserts which I chose to contrast every part of the woodland enviroment.

How I researched and drew the desert backgrounds would prove to be drastically different to drawing the woodland backgrounds this is not something I had thought about when starting this project but as I went into my research it became apparent. I have experience being in and around forests my entire life and having first had sources changed how I drew things, I have not had this experience in any way with American deserts which is part of the reason I wanted to explore them through this project but this factor made it a bit more difficult to make my drawing accurate in any way, however, the deserts were only a starting pint for the design so making it the same was not my plan from the start. deserts are vastly different from the English climate so this would represent how far the characters have traveled in a way most people can understand. but to make it obvious I had to look at many sources which are what I did through photos, I put together another mood board focussing on the deserts of America,

The things that stood out to me is the layers of rocks that make the formation, I have spoken in the past about how interesting and beautiful I find these and my view hasn’t changed, I made sure to make these layers apparent in the desert backgrounds I drew.

a lot of desert plants are dry with a lot of small leaves, this is not something I wanted to portray, I chose to replace them with larger more leafy plants that would typically be seen in a tropical climate.

the last big change was that of the mountain, I chose to soften the curves and make them less steep, the sharp and ragged cliff did not match my vision for the backgrounds so this was changed.

when I started out drawing the backgrounds I had troubling figuring out how I would draw the dry dusty resurface of the cliffs and valleys in the desert, my first attempt was to add texture by almost randomly putting brush strokes across the ground without much reason, this technique didn’t give a clear idea of what the grounds was made of and I soon figured out a much more effective way of representing the dusty ground. I did this by making dotted pattern cover parts of the ground,